Missing Persons, Political Landscapes and Cultural Practices

This book presents an anthropological exploration of human disappearances, from enforced disappearances under oppressive governments and during armed conflicts to disappearing undocumented migrants, and people who go missing under more everyday circumstances. These various contexts are united by two key threads: the relationship between the state and disappearances, and the consequences of disappearances for the families and communities of the missing.

Missing persons, political landscapes and cultural practices analyses both the circumstances that make some people disappear and the variety of responses that disappearances give rise to, including projects focused on searching for the missing and identifying human remains, as well as political projects calling for accountability. The book argues that the disappeared tend to reappear in one form or another - if they do not return alive or as identified remains, they reappear in other forms, such as photographs, artwork, memorials, ghosts and restless spirits.

The book provides empirical examples from a variety of places, with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina and the Mediterranean as key sites, and develops an analytic grip on the slippery category of the 'disappeared'. It argues that 'disappearance' is an anthropologically productive concept that brings us face to face with profound questions about human life and death, but also about rituals and mourning, violence and care, liminality and structures, and oppression and power. The book argues for an anthropological approach to human disappearances that is ethnographically sensitive to local idiosyncrasies, and theoretically attuned to similarities across diversity.